Saturday, January 03, 2009

Third time's a (very frustrating) charm

This is just getting more annoying all the time. My initial tests led me to think it was the monitor, but later I was able to get the monitor to work with the laptop, so I thought it had to be the video card. Now I've got a brand new video card, but I still have no image from the desktop machine, and the laptop still works just fine with it. So where does that take me next? The motherboard. Ugh...

I think I'm going to see if I can get the motherboard's on-board video to work. If so, then my guess is that it would mean that something tied to the PCI Express slot is messed up.

However, that still doesn't explain why my wife's monitor worked fine with my computer in one of my earliest tests. I think I'll try that one again as well. If that still works....well, I'll be completely stumped.

4 comments:

Randy said...

man, I caught some kind of trojan the other day, and thought I was having frustrations with my computer, but you're definitely winning this "which sucks more" contest. Sorry dude...

So this is your new monitor? Am I understanding that right? If I think of anything, I'll let you know, but it's got me stumped...

Justin S Barrett said...

No, it's still the old monitor. I initially thought that even though the DVI input wasn't working, I could use the VGA input. At first it worked, but then that stopped, too, and yet the monitor worked with my laptop just fine. That changed my focus from the monitor to the video card.

It's like all the components are playing an annoying game of blame-shifting.

Unknown said...

Hey Justin, troubleshooting that stuff is such a hassle. Couple of thoughts occurred to me though you've probably already checked them

1) are you using exactly the same cable(and adapters) with both the laptop and the desktop? I've had those little dvi adapters go bad.

2) are they both plugging into the same port on the monitor? DVI vs ole' vga?

Again, you've prolly already looked at em but wanted to share anyway. Happy New Year and hope you get it fixed soon:)

Justin S Barrett said...

Thanks for the thoughts, Josh. During all of my tests, I've been keeping a close eye on which cables are used, and which ports they're plugging into. So far I haven't found any evidence that points to a bad cable.

Here's something else I hadn't mentioned before, but which came up in a discussion with a visitor last night. When I say I'm not getting a picture, I mean I'm not getting ANY picture, even when the computer is booting up. Because of that, I've already ruled out the possibility of driver issues. This is definitely a hardware problem.